Clear nights are even rarer than normal at the moment in Denmark. There has only been a handful for the past 2-3 months! On this night, forecasts showed that only a few hours clear skies would be available, so I decided to go for something that might not need too long integration.
I have not really been much into open or globular clusters, but a few recent images by the highly accomplished
@Bart Delsaert made me try this one. Of course, this comes nowhere close to his amazing results, but this was the best I could do with the short integration time (and tiny scope, from bortle 6, with an OSC)! I had hoped for better SNR and the diffraction spikes are disappointingly fuzzy, but viewed at around 50% it looks ok.
I am still struggling to optimise the image train after switching to the ASI2600MC, but apart from a little tilt problem, the whole setup now weighs slightly too much for the counterweight on my mount, so I have an RA imbalance. I also have a slight DEC imbalance that I need to fix and combined with relatively windy conditions, I had some of the worst guiding ever at 0.9-1.5 RMS - that is larger than the image scale... Not good!
BlurXterminator to the rescue! The raw stack had a FWHM of 3.7 which reduced to 1.9 after BXT (default settings)! Eccentricity was also improved from 0.55 to 0.4, which is also very nice.
Colours are calibrated from SPCC in Pixinsight and should be relatively accurate.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy!
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